Author of Murders & Humor

An Interview withClifford B. Orr '22

The waiting room outside The NewYorker offices is tiled and about as exciting as the lobby of the Rogers House in Lebanon.

"Mr. Orr, please," we had said to the girl who peered through a window at us. "Clifford B. Orr '22," we added as she looked rather blank. The only reason we added "'22" was the vague hope that mention of the numerals might indicate to the girl that we knew Mr. Orr intimately and therefore ought to receive special consideration. As a matter of fact, we had never seen him before. Evidently all this did not get across to the girl. She next said: "Name, please?" "Clark." "Klein?" "No, Clark."

Presently Mr. Orr came in. He is young and fair-haired and soft-spoken and saddish-looking. An Alice-in-Wonderland impulse urged us to say, "Oh, Mouse!" but instead we said: "This is an awful imposition." "It is." So we went to lunch.

All we really knew about this fellow was that he had written "The Dartmouth Murders" and that he came back to Hanover from time to time to burble about with such people as George Frost '21, Bill McCarter '19, Franklin McDuffee '21, Bob Strong '24, and Sid Hayward '26. The word used to go around that poker was played by this visitor in town, and it was stated further that the visitor usually won. That wasn't much to work on, so we said.

"You read a great many detective stories, of course?"

"As a matter of fact," said Kip Orr, "I never read them. I don't suppose I've read ten in my life. When I was managing the Wall Street shop for Doubleday, Doran I had to sell so many of the things, I finally told myself that I could write one. And I did. The plot was laid in Hanover because that was one place that I knew fairly well. A lot of people told me that I was foolish to identify the story with Dartmouth. Since it was published I have had only one complaint, and I think maybe that was a joke. Farrar and Rinehart published the book and it came out on the day of the stock market crash in 1929. Then along came a magazine and presented me with a fat check for the serial rights and so I quit my job."

We ordered, both taking some sort of creamed lobster, Orr stipulating that no broccoli should be served with his. In the next half hour the following facts were established:

Clifford B. Orr was born in a blizzard in Portland, Me., November 11, 1899. Like everybody else, he was editor of the local high school paper. He had always been slated to go to Bowdoin, but happened to visit Hanover in the spring of his senior year at high school. Changed his mind and entered Dartmouth in 1918 to find himself in a confusion of S. A. T. C. Unlike almost everyone else, he liked it for no particular reason and was rewarded by having the Armistice arrive on his birthday. He jumped guard that night and went to Lebanon.

In the course of his undergraduate days he wrote two Carnival shows ("Rise Please," 1920, and "Hush!", 1921), did a column for The Dartmouth entitled "Old Bottles," won the Players' prize for a one-act play ("Tidewater"), resigned from the job of editor-in-chief of The Bema and helped revive The Dartmouth Literary Magazine which lasted a year or two.

He totalled up so many overcuts that he was required to take an extra pipe course his senior year. Which he flunked. His degree was awarded posthumously.

Orr had "always wanted to write."

So the week after Commencement he signed on with the Boston Transcript and stayed there for three years, doing features, a column of book news and chatter, light editorials and humor stuff for the editorial page.

The New York bug caught him in 1925 and he left the Transcript and moved to New York, there to be the publicity manager for Robert M. Mcßride and Co., publishers. That palled, so he took a fling at free-lancing. During this period he spent much of his time in Hanover.

There came the day, finally, when he returned to New York to work for Doubleday, Doran and it was while working as their Wall Street branch manager that he got the idea he could write a mystery story that would sell. At the time it was the first college mystery story, although there have been many others since. The book sold extremely well.

College Humor had published the story in serial form and then commissioned him to write a two-part follow-up mystery entitled "The College Club Murders." This was not published in book form.

Again he jumped from New York to Maine to Hanover and back again. For a while plans for another mystery were crystallizing. He admits he is a lazy fellow and that he writes slowly. When the time came, Farrar and Rinehart and College Humor announced "The Wailing Rock Murders." This book had a mild sale, although Orr describes it as a much better book than his first.

Now he moved to Ithaca and fiddled with the idea of doing "The Cornell Murders." By his own words, he is "still fiddling, with the book fairly well advanced and will probably continue to fiddle."

By way of diversion, he drove from Ithaca to New Orleans last year for the ride. He intended to stay a couple of weeks and stayed six months. Now he wants to go back.

It was at this point that short humour bits under his name began appearing in The New Yorker, Life, Redbook, and more recently, Esquire. Last summer he received the accolade and came back North to join The New Yorker staff. He works in the jot-and-tittle department, apparently. His chief concern is to pore over manuscripts, and to boil down innumerable facts and figures for the "Talk of the Town" section. It's pleasant work, he says.

Wrote "The DartmouthMurders"